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Crowdsourcing: A Definition

I like to use two definitions for crowdsourcing:

The White Paper Version: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.

The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.

The Rise of Crowdsourcing

Read the original article about crowdsourcing, published in the June, 2006 issue of Wired Magazine.

February 07, 2007

Superbowl Wrap-Up Continued

You'd think I would have discovered this sooner: crowdsourcing content for crowdsourcing.com. Less than 12 hours after I asked my readers to dig up the vocational backgrounds of the four runners-up in the Doritos "Crash the Superbowl" contest, one reader Daren C. Brabham had completed the assignment (Full Disclosure: I was in email correspondence with him and suggested he give it a shot).

The point was to determine whether such ad creative crowdsourcing efforts were truly exhibiting the work of talented amateurs, or merely undiscovered professionals. Here's what Daren came up with, in a slightly edited form. He raises some excellent questions that I'm going to wrestle with tomorrow in a follow-up.

"Check Out Girl" by Kristin C. Dehnert — Dehnert appears to have had
a considerable amount of experience in the film industry. She has blogged about her experience in the Doritos contest. The blog has more biographical information. She appears to have worked as a location manager on a number of productions, and a short film of hers won several awards at several smaller film fests. She doesn't
appear to have done anything this "big" before her success with
Doritos. I guess she is a good example of why if we're going to analyze
the demographics and skill sets of the crowd, we'll need to explicate
our categories a bit: What is an amateur, what is a professional,
etc.? Is this category determined by how much formal training you have,
how much tinkering and self-guided learning you do, how much success
you've actually had in getting paid for those skills, or what?

"Duct Tape" by Joe Herbert — Joe Herbert, of the Herbert Brothers,
is a Web designer, and his brother Dave runs a sports complex. I think
Herbert could easily be called an amateur, but again I would urge
clarification of the categories. Here is a biography on the Herbert
Bros. and a bit of their reflection on the Doritos experience.

"Chip Lover's Dream" by Jared Cicon - Cicon is a wedding
photographer. Again, this calls for
clarification between amateur and professional. If he is a photographer
by trade, he has the skill set to know how to capture life through a
lens. Yet, he's apparently not experienced with video, and he had never
done anything like the Doritos gig before. So is he an amateur, a
professional, or something in between? An article on Cicon.

"Mousetrap" by Billy Federighi - This one was my personal favorite
of all the Doritos commercials, and doing some Web scouring to learn
more about Federighi turned up something interesting: he's been in the
crowd before. Apparently he has had previous success in responding to Converse's crowdsourcing
venture, and now he has found success with Dorito's take on the model.

By all accounts,
though, it might be easy to call this student filmmaker an amateur, but
if he's had success with crowdsourced advertising before, does this
make him a professional, or just a veteran amateur? What happens when
people in the crowd begin to find repeat success with their ideas? When
their ideas rise to the top on more than one occasion, will they
receive offers to produce commercials for big companies in more of a
mainstream way? Will they forever stay true to the crowdsourcing model
and become elite faces in the crowd? We don't call even the best
batters in the church softball league professionals, but we certainly
can recognize their ability to consistently hit homeruns.

In other news, the college students who won the Chevy crowdsourced
ad campaign appear to be amateurs in a pretty pure sense of the word,
too. Perhaps we should start finding out how many of the crowdmembers
who have their designs picked by Threadless are professional, highly
trained graphic designers and how many are people who take their
doodles and make them more polished. Can we get that information from
Threadless, iStockphoto, and some of the other cases, Jeff?

Comments

Daren said: "Perhaps we should start finding out how many of the crowdmembers who have their designs picked by Threadless are professional, highly trained graphic designers and how many are people who take their doodles and make them more polished."

Daren, great research and informative post! In response to your query above, my initial foray into this exact question (I'm beginning to interview successful iStockers) has found that amateurs or "dabblers" who have an affinity for a particular creative endeavour (say photography or illustration) but often little "formal" education in the field ... have found crowdsourcing to be an empowering model/environment that has enabled them to enter a creative field and flourish without the traditional constraints of "professional" designation and accreditation. "Freedom to do what I want" is what I'm hearing from them. They gain technical and artistic skills as they work in their new field for sure - but often in a more adhoc or experiential fashion.

Sounds like the "learn by doing motto" that many youth organizations adopt; I agree with it wholeheartedly, too. I guess if research began to show that just as many "amateurs" as "professionals" were finding success working in the crowd, that would have some implications for the value of professionalism and for formal training. In other words, if a Rhode Island School of Design graduate and a non-schooled hobbyist found equal success in the crowd, RISD would get worried. When pedigrees begin to not matter so much, who will seek them out?

I'm wondering if iStockphoto or Threadless or any of the other crowdsourcing examples would mind eventually letting some of us develop a survey to post to their membership. This would greatly help us put a face to the crowd, so to speak. I'm wondering if the crowd is as diverse as we think, both in terms of race/class/gender/etc. and in terms of skill sets and professional training. Shazz, you're tight with iStockphoto...do you think Bruce would let us post a survey to the homepage or email one out to the membership a ways down the road?

(p.s. Shazz--when I cite your interview you did on this blog, I cite you as Shazz Mack, not Lise Gagne. I just think it's awesome to send research out for review that cites Mack, S. (2007). Yay for pen names.)

So much great stuff here guys I'm not sure where to begin. I think you're right Daren--We need to properly define what qualities comprise an amateur. I thought I'd use the comment section here as a brainstorm space, and then propose something a bit more formal in a post in the next few days.

So let's start simple. For me, frankly, the distinction between professional and amateur isn't blurry. A professional, definitively speaking, earns their livelihood from the practice of whatever skill or talent under discussion. Not, I want to emphasize, a supplementary income, but their livelihood. So:
Professional: One who practices a craft as a vocation.
Amateur: One who practices a craft as an avocation.

However, where I see a need for distinctions is in the levels of professional. This becomes clear by looking at the backgrounds of the five Doritos winners. Here's how I would break it down.

Dale Backus: Professional, though hardly at the level of an agency creative with a decade of experience working on international corporate accounts. He's a kid. 21 years old. Let's call him an Entry Level Professional.

Kristin Denhert: Professional. A quick glance at her IMDB.com profile (see Daren's post above) reveals that she's been in the industry for over ten years, and has directed her own short. Let's call her an Established Professional, a distinction we can make based on qualitative attributes, ie, amount of time working in profession and the number of products/projects under the person's belt.

Joe Herbert: Amateur. Web design is not film/video production.

Jared Cicon: Ditto. An eye for composition doesn't mean you know how to mix sound levels in post-production. More to the point, Cicon earns his money as a photographer, a related but not synonymous craft.

Billy Federighi: This is a tough one. I would propose yet one more distinction for Federighi: Aspiring Professional. I won't call him a pro for the above hard-and-fast rule: He's not making his money in film/video production (as far as we know). But he'd like to, and plans to, and by all accounts probably will soon. For what it's worth, any film student--such as those that won the Chevrolet contest--fall under the same rubric.

There's one last distinction that's not represented above (and I'd venture will rarely be represented on the rolls of crowdsourcees): The Elite Professional. Who is this? Well, the NY ad exec from the WSJ whose quote I used in my original post, for one. Andrew Sullivan. Spike Jonez. Obviously the line between established professional and elite professional *does* get blurry, but I think generally an Elite Professional is someone working in the top tiers of their profession, with significant laurels and well-known projects to their credit.

These are all a bit off-the-cuff, but I think it's a start. What do you guys think?